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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Christ tries to enter Global Britain,\u00a0Easter 2022<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n by Chris Nash<\/em><\/p>\n Adrian Henri, beat poet brother He knelt, exhausted \u201cCall me Jesus, of brown-skinned descent,<\/em> bare head bowed, he stands on the shore, \u201cWhile we retro-danced the day away<\/em> The unfamiliar rhythms of other shores On his shoulders they put a blanket, The depths of history will not be still Churchmen who intone so fervently And as we drove home, mile after mile Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n Queen Nzinga (Nzinga Mbande), 1583\u2014 1663, was the monarch of the Mbundu people, was a resilient leader who fought against the Portuguese and their expanding slave trade in Central Africa.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christ tries to enter Global Britain,\u00a0Easter 2022 by Chris Nash Adrian Henri, beat poet brothercreator of Christ\u2019s entry in 1964to free-verse,\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 free-jazz,\u00a0…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":550,"featured_media":14529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/550"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
creator of Christ\u2019s entry in 1964
to free-verse,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 free-jazz,
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 free-love
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Liverpool,
the happenings have all happened;
while we were waiting, agitating,
for fresh colours to grow in the Union Jack,
your pop-parade of progress passed by;
the chip papers playing at our feet
mutated into EDL flyers, selling fear,
till headlines of hate litter Dover beach
where England and the horizons meet.<\/p>\n
on the shingle,
a single male,
on international terrorism lists
for attacks on a temple
his Home office label
\u2018a dangerous anti-capitalist\u2019<\/p>\n
I confess, I am an illegal immigrant<\/em>
I teach truths without borders.<\/em>
Illegal, to be born without a father,<\/em>
illegal, my migrant desperate flight<\/em>
to Egypt\u2019s sheltering sanctuary<\/em>
away from Herod\u2019s genocide, his cruelty;<\/em>
illegal my years of wandering<\/em>
a healer without licence or authority;<\/em>
my words, thorns in the sides<\/em>
of Romans, Sanhedrin\u2019s, Pharisees;<\/em>
illegal my cleansing of the temple<\/em>
my deeds of holy redeeming disgust<\/em>
that put me on their terrorism list;<\/em>
illegal my entry to Jerusalem on a donkey<\/em>
accused of Revolution and anarchy<\/em>
for sowing the seeds of unruly love;<\/em>
illegally hanging on a rough cross<\/em>
abandoned and beyond all loss<\/em>
till I denied death by resurrection:<\/em>
illegally washed on Dover\u2019s stony shore<\/em>
I ask refugee status, no less, no more,<\/em>
my cheek turned for an official\u2019s kiss,<\/em>
arms outstretched for England\u2019s justice.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
haloed by security cameras and UK law<\/p>\n
at a union flag, nostalgia festooned<\/em>
Brexit festival of Britain on the beach:<\/em>
We loved Love Me Do to the sixties;<\/em>
We Dancing Queened the seventies;<\/em>
We Madonnaed the eighties away;<\/em>
We Elton Johned the naughty nineties;<\/em>
We Britneyed to new millennium dreams;<\/em>
We Biebered through the 20teens:<\/em>
Clinging to innocence, we were groomed.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n
were not unheard, but too easily ignored,
memories dissolving with sugar spoons,
in warm, shallow waves of radio tunes.<\/p>\n
on his healing hands, handcuff bracelets.
He babbled on, advised to remain silent
a crowd stared, unsure what he meant,
by the thorns of love\u2019s trials and torment.
In a stir of Jamaican coffee on the esplanade,
can you hear the ringing feet of a child runaway.<\/p>\n
along Dover beach, broken hands
are washing up among the wet sands
where Nzinga\u2019s daughters once sang;
Broken hands bound in manacle rings
discarded bodies of slave ship Zong.<\/p>\n
the duty of compassionate slavery;
Gangs whose profits thrive on human trade
first licensed for slavery\u2019s runaways,
slaves, labourers, the equally illegal
entered in their register of \u2018disposables\u2019.<\/p>\n
in the gathering dark of an inner exile,
adrift on a twig of raft, so far out to sea
a mother, a child, hands joined in frailty.<\/p>\n